Planning is the area of Parish activity which most exercises the electorate, since an application to develop near or close to your own property could affect the amenity of your property.
The Parish Council has therefore always encouraged the electors to come and speak on any applications which may affect their property. No time limit is imposed, either for an individual or a group of individuals.
In dealing with the applications, the Parish Council has to be consistent. We are still guided by the adopted Local Plan of Macclesfield Borough Council, which seeks to protect the Conservation Areas and the Class mix of London Road. The accepted mix is two thirds A1 Retail and one third A3 Restaurant use.
The number of applications upon which the Parish Council was consulted was 91, one more than last year, and the issues remain fairly constant, namely:
- breaches of the Macclesfield Local Plan
- unneighbourly development, impacting on the amenity of neighbours,
- highways issues caused by new proposals
- late amendments which are not consulted upon
The threat to the future is the nature of changes being promulgated by Central Government. The last Labour Government reduced the input of local Councils, including District and Unitary Councils by imposing targets of applications decided by officers. The targets were financial penalised if they were not met. The new Cheshire East Council is consulting upon a new Local Plan; the danger to Alderley Edge is that there were few Conservation Areas in other Boroughs, and the Parish has submitted comments to Cheshire East that the new Plan ought to continue to protect the values which were in the MBC Plan.
However, DCLG is now making noises about allowing widespread conversion of Retail outlets to A3 outlets. The implications of a village full of A3 outlets is that the parking problems will get worse. The needs of lower paid restaurant staff, needing to park for free on residential roads, will be the price borne by residential properties.
This year the application to convert the A2 permission already granted on the London Road/Stevens Street property caused a Planning Appeal, and the decision of the Inspector was that there should be A2 or A1 Retail on that site. The Parish Council opposed the application to convert, because a previous Inspector had specified that no food ought to be allowed on that site.This consistency is important because there will shortly be a determination on the Heyes Lane Royal Oak site, on the land which is in the MBC Local Plan as protected open space. That principle of protecting the open space was upheld by an Inspector at a previous Appeal by St Modwen Developers who had applied to build on that space. The Parish Council cannot pick and choose which previous appeal decisions we support.
The Parish has been subjected to the large scale developments of, but not exclusive to, Macclesfield Road. The next stage, which has already started, is for sites to be intensively developed and we have such an application being determined at the present time. Highways issues and neighbourly amenity will be tested by such new applications coming forward.
The Local Plan consultations produced SHLAA sites which, on their own, could produce 2,000 new homes in Alderley Edge. Clearly such proposals threaten the infrastructure of the village, and those sites have no real prospect of all being developed. One of the sites included was the land being Beech Road, capable of producing between 200 to 250 houses. The Parish Council will submit objections to this site being included in the Local Plan targets, for different reasons, not least of which is that half of the site is in Wilmslow, and it would be a dangerous precedent to have the Wilmslow/Alderley Edge boundaries breached.
The issue of late and amended consultations has not improved since last year. Applicants have always exercised the ability to withdraw applications which are headed for refusal. Recent trends show that now, instead of withdrawing, applicants submit variations which seem to be acceptable to Planning Officers. These variations are not sent out for further consultation. A cynic might conclude that applicants could submit Plan A, knowing that it may be recommended for refusal, but they could have Plan B prepared in advance.
This would mean that they circumvent the consultation process for the amended plans, whereas the pre-planning consultations ought to have resolved the reservations of the Planning Officers.
Neighbours are not allowed pre-planning discussions, they are not allowed to object to approvals, they are not allowed to see notes of discussions between applicants and officers. It does not feel like democracy, and the Parish Council should resolve to lobby the local MP to have the balance between applicants and neighbours tilted back to where the neighbours have a real chance of having their valid objections heard.
I am grateful to the Parish Clerk, Anne Ross, who makes sense of the discussions during Plans Meetings and keeps well ordered records of the Planning System.
Report by Cllr Frank Keegan, Chairman of Plans, Alderley Edge Parish Council 2012-2013.
